Shot, killed, conquered, the game that did it all

Vaibhav Sharma

In the month of September 2018, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) Mobile, a first-person shooter, set in a Battle-Royale style format crossed an amazing 20-million daily-user mark. Said differently, that means 2,00,00,000 people play this one game every single day on their mobile phones. The game has an installed user base of over 100 million people and it was launched only recently on March 19, 2018 on iOS and Android. While it hasn’t quite hit the Angry Birds level of success just yet, its growth story is remarkable. Unlike casual games like Angry Birds, Temple Run, Fruit Ninja and Candy Crush to name a few, PUBG isn’t something you play to kill time, you instead take time out to play PUBG!

Recipe for success

The popularity of movies like The Hunger Games and WWE’s Battle Royale programming has shown that people enjoy the who-will-be-the-last man-standing routine. With PUBG, instead of just observing the scene unfold, players are given a window into a world where they themselves can compete for the spoils of victory.

As the game starts, a group of players parachutes into unknown tract of land, where they immediately begin to scavenge for weapons and equipment. The mission is both survival and murder, to win the game you must kill the other players, and ensure you aren’t shot in the process. The USP of the game is that unlike other first-person shooters where you can spend money to buy weapons and equipment to put your opponents at a disadvantage, in PUBG everyone goes in sans arms. The only thing you can spend money on is clothing, but that does not aid in gameplay.

Everyone’s welcome to play

As everyone joins the game as an equal, the unique approach encourages online multiplayer gameplay. It does not matter if it is the first time you’re playing or if you’re a pro, in both cases you start with nothing. To ensure that players don’t hide while waiting for the rest of the contestants to kill each other, the game shirks the playing zone after every few minutes. If you remain outside the zone, you begin to lose health, unless you follow the map and enter the play zone. This increases the chances of you bumping into other players, and virtually guarantees a fight. The last player standing, as always, wins.

To adapt the game for mobile gameplay, a lot of the things have been modified from the console version. For example, simply walking up to a discarded weapon automatically picks it up, which otherwise on the Xbox or a Playstation would require a key press, this gives the player more screen real estate, which is already at a premium on mobile phones.

Online and at task

The real charm of PUBG gameplay is that you compete simultaneously with your friends, irrespective of their physical location in the world. The game connects to your social media accounts, and presents a list of your friends who play PUBG, and this makes starting an online multiplayer session with your pals trivial. You can enter the game as a team, and play against others teams from around the world. To make the experience more immersive, the gameplay is supported of voice chats as you play.

Up to 100 players can compete in this fight to the death, and you can enter individually or in a team of upto four players. The map area, when the game begins, is approximately 8x8 kilometers, and players are awarded with in-game currency based on the length of their survival, kills and damage affected.

You are glued, not addicted but...

First-person shooters on the PC and consoles often have huge engaging missions that take hours to complete, encouraging users to spend a considerable amount of time playing. When quizzed about how addictive PUBG is, Nitin Kaushal, a lawyer by profession who is also an avid gamer says, “PUBG is different, it is inviting, but doesn’t force you to keep playing all day. The format of the game is such that each match will end in about 40-45 minutes as the playing area keeps shrinking.” This means that the gaming session ends relatively quickly, and you can then get back to work after giving yourself a break. Online gameplay is battery intensive as the cellular radios as well as the processor and GPU in the phone are all firing at capacity with the screen always lit. PUBG manages to give players an immersive experience that lasts long enough, but the battery hit isn’t enough to kill the smartphone in the middle of the day.

Privilege of first-person shooters

In an article published in the New Yorker, Lennart Nacke, the director of the Games and Media Entertainment Research Laboratory at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, says that the deviation from our regular life, and the violent visceral situations we don’t normally have, is what make first-person shooters particularly compelling. He elaborates by saying that it isn’t that humans want to be frenzied in real life, and the game gives us an outlet, but that these games help vent pent-up emotions and impulses. “If you look at it in terms of our evolution, most of us have office jobs. We’re in front of the computer all day. We don’t have to go out and fight a tiger or a bear to find our dinner. But it’s still hardwired in humans. Our brain craves this kind of interaction, our brain wants to be stimulated. We miss this adrenaline-generating decision-making,” he concludes.

PUBG not only provides this subconscious release, but it also lets you do so anytime and anywhere, along with a social construct. Plus more than anything, playing a sniper or an all-round renegade feels cool, and it has never been easier to scratch that itch. The ‘me against the world’ setting that PUBG provides, is paying rich dividends to its developers.

Tencent, the company behind PUBG Mobile has generated over $75 million in revenue within six months of the game’s release. $25 million of that has come within the last month, and the game currently averages a revenue of $5.2 million a week according to Sensor Tower, a portal focussed on the global app economy. While the bulk of the revenue is driven by United States, Japan and South Korea, with a 21 per cent, 18 per cent and 10 per cent share respectively, Tencent has been unable to monetise in China, its home country due to a suspension in issuance of new game licence approvals from the country’s regulatory body SART (the State Administration of Radio and Television).

The rapid success of PUBG and other high-quality intensive games on the smartphone has ensured that developers look at the smartphone as a huge money spinner, and users will be treated to console-quality gaming as mobile phones become more popular. Developers may not be able to price the mobile versions of the games as high as they do on the Xbox or the Play Station, and ad revenue may not entirely offset the difference. But, not everyone has a console, whereas the smartphone is ubiquitous. What you lose in price, you more than make up in volume.

Advantage India

Not content with organic, word-of-mouth growth, the developers have also announced the PUBG Mobile Campus Championship in India. The competition is targeting college students and teams from any campus in India can participate. The tournament will comprise four knockout rounds to shortlist the best 20 teams, which will compete in the grandfinal. The total prize pool is a cool Rs. 50 lakh. Tencent games India’s General Manager Aneesh Arvind commented on the announcement saying “The PUBG Mobile Campus Championship 2018 reflects Tencent’s and PUBG Corp’s big step towards developing a robust eSports ecosystem in India. This is the first time we are organising an eSports championship here and we are extremely excited to bring it to as many campuses of India as possible. We are glad that PUBG Mobile has received an overwhelming response in India and we look forward to working with our fans and partners to make this a grand spectacle. This championship marks the beginning of many steps towards making PUBG Mobile, the game of choice in India.”

Competition is just as lethal

While PUBG may have beaten its rival Fortnite to launch on iOS and Android quicker, Fortnite, despite being iOS only for a long time and only having released on Android in August, is crushing PUBG when it comes to revenue. Its total downloads have so far crossed 125 million, with 40 million monthly active users. If PUBG became the bigger cultural phenomenon, Fortnite has become the first-person shooter to beat. However, the soon to be released Call of Duty: Blackout firmly has both titles in its crosshairs, and given the power of the ‘Call of Duty’ brand, PUBG’s reign may soon be coming to an end. But, how so ever it pans out for the developers, the users are in for a treat.